You are not the Bodhisattva, who walked outside the palace wall to experience the real world! You are like the editors of this publication who can’t comprehend the rise of ‘The Rebellion Against the Elites’ once the Party Line of this newspaper. The reasons for the rise of political parties like Podemos, and a once ascendant and unbowed Syriza, is a conundrum that doesn’t register in your political/moral imagination. Sanders,Corbyn, Le Pen, and the vile American Political Monster Trump, and his capos McConnell and Ryan are the players, who remain strategically off stage in your Seattle Idealism. Yours is the world of benevolent Capital and caffeine fueled hipsters and copious self-congratulation, allied to an insufferable smugness. But the potential for the rise of popular discontent- you haven’t been in Seattle long enough to have experienced The Battle in Seattle of 1999?

The 173 miles that separates Seattle from Portland is such a short distance, south down the Interstate 5. How is that relevant to your Seattle Idealism? The motto of Portland is ‘Keep Portland Weird‘. Is the Portland contagion containable?

‘I saw the damage done by the black clad anarchist thugs. Many were arrested and their profiles were similar – drop outs with no education, no employment because they were were unemployable, almost all petty criminals.’

Why would the Black Block target the WTO, the G-20 or the IMF and other such organizations, that proclaim the good tidings of Neo-Liberalism? While The Great Unwashed riot in the streets of their chosen cities, or as you frame it: ‘black clad anarchist thugs’…’drop outs with no education’…’unemployable’…’almost all petty criminals’ , in sum its the future your looking at, as ‘an enfeebled’ America’s condition reaches its many plateaus of an ever increasing political crisis.

Your boosterism reads like Babbitt, or even like the rhetoric of that notorious porcine political revolutionary Newt Gingrich. The Stock Market is doing just fine,thank you! after its thieves were bailed out, with that extra little something, quantitative easing. Yes Keynesianism worked, in an emergency. The Why of the rise of Populism remains outside your ken, while prosperity for the 99% is unrealized. Are you not even acquainted with the work of Piketty and his critics? And your latest reply is, to say the least, patronizing. Your reference to East Germany is just maladroit Old School Red Baiting!